Are Those Love Songs? On a Yeasayer Album?

Published: January 28, 2010

YEASAYER is braced for a backlash. “People could turn on us at any moment,” said a smiling Anand Wilder, 27. He’s one of the three songwriters, singers and multi-instrumentalists in the Brooklyn band Yeasayer, along with Chris Keating, 28, and Ira Wolf Tuton, 30.

Harry Herd/Redferns

The Brooklyn band Yeasayer — from left, Anand Wilder, Chris Keating and Ira Wolf Tuton — in concert in England.

Yeasayer’s second album, “Odd Blood” (Secretly Canadian/We Are Free), purposely sidesteps the sounds that made the band an indie-rock sensation with its 2007 debut album, “All Hour Cymbals.” Released on the tiny independent label We Are Free, that album has sold more than 40,000 copies in the United States and another 30,000 worldwide, according to the band’s manager and label head, Jason Foster. It’s success enough to encourage Yeasayer to risk giving its fans what they don’t expect.

On “Odd Blood,” due for release Feb. 9, the atmospheric, low-fi haze of the debut album is gone. The sounds of acoustic instruments and echoes of African and Celtic music are upstaged by synthesizers, samples and programming. Instead of vocal-harmony chorales and canons, there are many more straightforward solo lead vocals. There are also love songs — uneasy ones, but love songs nonetheless.

For minutes at a time a newcomer might think Yeasayer isn’t a vital part of New York City’s continuing reinvention of art-rock via world music and digital technology, a band mentioned alongside Dirty Projectors, TV on the Radio and Animal Collective and praised by indie-rock arbiters like Pitchfork Media for its “pan-ethnic spiritualism.”

When Mr. Wilder sings “Hold me like before, hold me like you used to” in the song “O.N.E.,” with drum machines and plinking, booping keyboards, Yeasayer could almost be an electropop band. (The group set aside a nearly finished version of “O.N.E.” because it “sounded too much like a beer commercial,” Mr. Tuton said.)

Yeasayer revamped itself with conceptual intent. “It was only natural to find the specific elements, the defining elements, of the last record and to eliminate those and create holes,” Mr. Keating said. “Then you had to fill those holes in with other stuff that we like, which is a lot of electronic, dance-inspired production and cool synthetic tones that haven’t been heard before.”

The band, which includes two more musicians for live shows — Jason Trammell on drums (replacing Luke Fasano) and Ahmed Gallab on keyboards and percussion — was crammed into its room at the Scientific Laboratories rehearsal studios, down a graffitied alley in Williamsburg.

A space smaller than some walk-in closets held the five musicians along with assorted guitars, drum kits, drum machines, computers, percussion and keyboards, including a red one with a dozen keys chipped off or sprung upward; Mr. Keating had battered it with drumsticks during one overly enthusiastic gig. Mr. Foster sat cross-legged on the floor by the door, checking e-mail on a laptop. When Mr. Wilder mentioned that he’d love to play Japan, Mr. Foster announced, “We just got a call from Japan today.”

Yeasayer rehearsed songs while surrounding an interviewer who was perched on a road case, inches from Mr. Wilder’s guitar. “Do you have earplugs?” Mr. Wilder asked. “Love Me Girl” was complex funk, with hurtling drumbeats, jittery processed piano chords and a plaintive refrain: “Don’t give up on me.” Soca and polka beats, horn samples and wah-wah guitar stoked “Mondegreen.” When the music stopped, the sound of another band practicing nearby came through the thin walls. “This is a place we’ve outgrown,” Mr. Keating said with a shrug.

Between songs Yeasayer’s members joshed with one another and their manager, laughing at in-jokes and imagining their future rock-star egos out of control. “We have similar sensibilites, with a kind of Northeast sarcasm,” Mr. Tuton said. “We can have conversations with each other and not offend each other too much and not be too sensitive around each other. To be in a band, you need to be not too sensitive to each other.”